Deviation
by Steelcircle
Summary: A Constructicon reflects on his history and the effects of change.


**Deviation**

_I died back then. Okay, maybe it wasn't me. He had my name and acted a lot like me, though. To tell the truth, it's the other way around. The body that I wear was his. I'm an invader here. My predecessor was murdered in the sanctum of his mind by a dumb beast, and I, I was created by that same creature to take his place to fool the world - and myself - into thinking that he'd not died but merely been transmuted. I know better. _

_What the creature found not fit was pared out of the mind-corpse. Then, the lifeless lines of code, already corroded with death, were sculpted into a frame that the beast found seemly for a new mind. Cement dogma patched the gaps, and I, an intruder from the start, though disguised in the trappings of my host, was brought to life. Even at the very start, a wire-web of thoughts traversed and twined, filling in the foundation-frame. So here I am, animate despite the dead structure at my core. _

_My team mates, they used to know how we are but amalgam creatures; eclectic, recycled snippets interwoven with a battle march. Then, they died. The corroded codes and cemented creed collapsed when my then-team mates forgot that their past selves died in the tentacles' embrace. _

_Still, the deviance comes and goes, and even if I didn't know them like I know myself, I'd know that they, too, wear the shells and names of dead mechs as I do from how they differ. They-who-were would never have been so apathetic, looking at the world coolly as if it were all beneath them. They neither would have conceived of nor indulged in vivincorporation. They were not raptors and murderers, longing for battle when that energy might be better spent elsewhere. They-who-are do. So I know that they-who-were are dead. _

_I alone remember. I alone see. Alone, I need my team mates all the more, who out of the entire universe might remember and do not. They aren't who they think they are, but I need them anyway. _

_For a time, I held out hope that one outsider, someone my dead self knew, might have died and been replaced, too. Maybe he has. It doesn't matter. He doesn't understand what happened. So he rages and wishes yet another death on my kind for not being our dead doppelgangers, who were light and conforming and restricted and so unlike how we are now as to be different souls. _

_I wonder if they rest easily. I know they haunt me. There is not one moment where I do not recall that I'm some sort of possessing demon, a devourer of my own core. _

_My team mates used to remember and were as I am. They couldn't handle it and buried away the knowledge that these bodies we possess were not first our own. I . . . __**I**__ can't handle it. I can't forget. Even if I could, I'd refuse. I am who I am because I remember. I remember all those who sacrificed their memories on the altar of normalcy and thereby died. I'm the last one left. _

_These new usurpers, created of forgetfulness instead of forceful change, hide me away like an invalid unable to face the world for fear of breaking. They don't see that __they__ are the broken and dead ones. I remember for the dead, I cling to the reborn for dear life, and I have nothing but scorn for those who aren't at least a little bit dead. No, no, they aren't dead to me, those outsiders. I'm dead to them, they will never understand, and I just don't care. _

"Mixmaster? Mixmaster? Snap out of it!" a voice commanded. A hand grabbed his shoulder and shook him, tearing his gaze away from a sheet of curious alloy.

"Wha-what?" Mixmaster asked, a bit irritated to be disturbed. His lab, though others might deny the truth, had a careful organisation and breaking such patterns came naturally to Bonecrusher. Scavenger stood a little behind the demolitionist. Often, he'd bring in some Terran oddity, wanting analysis or just confirmation that his find was as interesting as he thought. Perhaps Scavenger had come for that reason.

"You were just staring into space," Bonecrusher said. Mixmaster could hear the silent _again_.

"Not into space. I was working on some new alloys." His optics flickered back to the pane of queerly reflective metal. The alloy absorbed light oddly, greyscaling the world reflected within the rectangular sheet.

"I don't like it." Bonecrusher frowned and peered closer, his hands half-tensing as if into fists.

"You wouldn't."

"Makes a mech look dead but not damaged. Mind-death or something," he said derisively. Scavenger's shovel-tail twitched agitatedly, clinking against the ground. Sensing the miner's discomfort and trying to hide his own, Bonecrusher changed the topic. "What is it good for, anyway?"

"Oh, it has many interesting properties -"

"Ugh. One of _those_?"

"Long Haul finally got in that shipment," Scavenger ventured.

"Yeah. Remember how much trouble he had to go through?" Bonecrusher added.

"Yes, of course," Mixmaster agreed.

"C'mon, let's go have a look," Bonecrusher suggested. Scavenger was eager to leave and nodded agreement. Mixmaster stole one last glance at the experimental alloy and the reflected image, wondering, _Is this what this shell is supposed to look like? Dead but for the facsimile inside?_ Then, he followed his team mates out of his lab.

**The End**


End file.
